


line of succession

by atlas_oulast



Series: Be More Quarantine Fics [1]
Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, F/M, Hurt/No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Post-Canon, Post-Squip Jeremy Heere
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:34:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23308426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlas_oulast/pseuds/atlas_oulast
Summary: Jeremy has every reason to be insanely overjoyed right now. Every reason to be excited beyond comprehension.But he isn’t.(For the Be More Quarantine Challenge)
Relationships: Jeremy Heere & Jenna Rolan, Jeremy Heere & Michael Mell, Jeremy Heere/Christine Canigula
Series: Be More Quarantine Fics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1682470
Comments: 5
Kudos: 30





	1. reigning misery monarch

**Author's Note:**

> im running the be more quarantine challenge but i have to obey my own rules so:
> 
> dear future me who is reading this in the morning:
> 
> i used all 3 prompts and wrote 2,327 words, ao3 might disagree but fuck that.
> 
> anyway if you’re not me mind the tags

Jeremy was sitting up in bed at two in the morning, a blanket nest wrapped haphazardly around him, glasses on and down his nose, writing in horrible handwriting by flashlight in a notebook.

It was a list, a pros and cons list. No title at the top of the page, but he knew exactly what he was doing.

The pros were as follows:

  * No more hallucinations 
  * No more nightmares
  * No more being awkward around Michael & everyone else
  * No more hurting myself
  * No more 
  * No more
  * No more



He was still adding to the pros list, almost half asleep as he robotically added ‘No more’ as an item again and again.

The cons side of the sheet of paper was empty.

After filling up the pros side with repetitions of ‘No more,’ Jeremy turned finally to the cons.

He wrote only one.

  * It scares me.



_____________________

Lunchtime after the Squip was completely different from before, and it never failed to weird him out every day at 12:56 every day, when his lunch period began.

He didn’t have lunch with all the kids he’d crossed paths with with the Squip, that wouldn’t make sense at all, and the current arrangement at least made the tiniest, tiniest bit of sense.

Still not much.

It was him, Christine, Michael of course, and freaking Jenna Rolan. If you had asked him before the Squip the two people least likely to sit with him and Michael, he would have said Christine and Chloe Valentine. He wouldn’t have even put Jenna in the top 50 because he hadn’t known she existed.

But Christine was his _girlfriend_ now, another thing that would never fail to shock him, they had gone on exactly 5 dates and they were going on a 6th that night.

And Jenna was there too, and she existed, and she was actually really cool and good to talk to, and she and Michael clicked really well, even if Michael had been hesitant about bringing _anyone_ new to the table, least of all the invisible school gossip.

It was good that Jenna and Michael had hit it off, and Christine was friendly with her, and Jeremy himself really liked Jenna and was able to bond with her on a surprising amount of things.

But it didn’t matter that Jeremy was good with Jenna. It wouldn’t matter much longer, anyway.

Christine was chattering excitedly about their date plans, how they were going to this apparently cute little diner in the next town over that Jeremy had never been to, and then maybe walking it off and window shopping until Christine had to go home to make her curfew.

He hated that his heart just wasn’t in it... that he didn’t even really want to go.

Not because of Christine, he loved her beyond comprehension, but because he was just... tired. He would be good with just laying in bed and watching YouTube all nigh, maybe with some dry cereal. It would disappoint Christine to tell her and he wouldn’t dare. He loved her, and he didn’t want her to think it was her fault.

He was simply perpetually tired and... a little bit cold inside.

A lot bit cold inside.

But not to disappoint the girl he loved, he listened, chimed in with a false voice of excitement, and listened to Michael talking about a mod he found for Apocalypse of the Damned that unlocked a bonus room in Level 11 and made the whole thing a two to four player game when it was normally only two player.

And then he drifted through the rest of the school day, barely paying attention to his classes but not daydreaming or doodling, just staring into space and listening absently, feeling strangely out of body all the while, like he was floating alongside himself.

He drifted home and participated in a required five minute conversation with his father, who was stepping up recently, which should have made Jeremy overjoyed to no end, but it simply made him feel... empty.

And like he didn’t deserve this at all.

After the brief conversation with his pants-wearing father, he trudged upstairs and got in the shower, holding his head of greasy hair under the shower head and letting it soak him through.

And _oh_ , he hadn’t even taken off his sweaty clothes, and why didn’t that bother him? Why didn’t it strike any emotion at all in him at all?

He pulled off his tee shirt easily enough, but the binder underneath, already normally very hard to remove, now sopping wet, took him ten minutes standing in the stream of water and struggling with the tight garment, feeling like he would die like this, binder half off, the shower washing over his body, dead from chest binder.

The thought amused him vaguely in his current misery, tangled in wet clothes and his gangly arms, until he felt a strange yet nonexistent glow shining on his body as it watched.

Ignoring it as best he could (his best was not very good), he finally got off the binder, which was immediately yeeted across the room, rather than discarded on the bottom of the bathtub like his shirt.

His pants were kicked off, and he unceremoniously ditched his completely sopping wet clothes onto the bathroom floor, picking them up and half heartedly throwing them in the laundry basket in there when he was done in the shower, wrapped in a towel up to his neck because he couldn’t do as boys do and tuck it around his hips.

He combed his hair a bit, and put on a fresh, not sopping wet binder, and a fresh, clean shirt. It was one of his nicer shirts, a freshly washed Minecraft shirt.

Hey, he hadn’t said it was his _nicest_ shirt.

Clean jeans, a blue jacket, and his Hello Kitty shoes completed the look.

He’d purchased the Hello Kitty shoes on a whim, the day he’d gotten out of the hospital, he’d been bored and tired after his fourth nap of the day, and he was browsing Amazon absently, and he stumbled upon the shoes and he knew he just _had_ to have them.

They were so kitschy and wonderfully _stupid_ that they would make any normal person cry or cringe.

As it was, it had taken Jeremy a lot of bravery and a lot of bathroom pep talking to wear the shoes to school, and Christine had been lost in amazement over them at lunch that day, and at their bowling alley performance date, so they became his Shoes To Be Worn When One Is On A Date With Christine Or One Needs To Impress Christine.

He laced up the shoes, and gave himself one last check in the mirror.

Jeremy hated the reflection that looked back at him, but Christine would like it. She tended to like weird things a lot, and for some reason she really really loved one disgusting, not very good- _horrible_

He bade his Dad goodbye, told him he’d be back by eleven, and he was granted permission to use the car.

He picked up Christine outside of her house, a quaint little Victorian a little closer to school. It was exactly the house he’d imagined she would live in, and he found himself so lucky that he had not only found out that she did indeed live in a powder blue Victorian house, but also had been able to fucking go _inside_ Christine’s _house._

Christine opened the cherry red front door, waved goodbye to someone inside, and slammed the door shut beside her, a slam of excitement and not anger. She raced outside, her Twinkle Toes lighting up and sparkling in the early evening sunshine.

She hopped in the passenger seat next to Jeremy and gave him a soft, happy kiss on the cheek, that did give him the first stirring of a _good_ feeling that whole week. Not that that was her fault... it was his.

Why did she love him, anyway?

He was thankful he could drive and have something to do with his hands, otherwise he would’ve been fidgeting like the blundering idiot he was in the passenger seat.

Christine carried the conversation and Jeremy did his part in keeping it alive, but no more than the minimum talking he had to do. Christine either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and that was okay with him.

The diner was indeed cute, rows of red vinyl booths and a counter with round red vinyl stools lined up against it.

Christine parked them in a booth, and introduced him to the waitress whom she apparently personally knew, Marlene. Christine ordered some chilli cheese fries, and Jeremy ordered the veggie burger, to which Marlene responded that not a lot of people ordered that and they’d have to specially get a patty out of the fridge for him, which made Jeremy extremely uncomfortable and guilty.

He felt that his relative uncomfortable state wasn’t enough payment for this heinous crime.

The date otherwise was fine, the diner was cute as promised, and the two of them shared a chocolate milkshake, which was romantic and all, but Jeremy couldn’t bring himself to even have a flutter in his heart.

Jeremy knew in this moment he should be more than overjoyed, falling over himself in fact, but he finally realised that he was simply empty, numb, devoid of feeling.

And he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was watching him with a disapproving look.

They window shopped after, in this town’s downtown, a place Jeremy had never been. It felt like a place frozen in 1975, with the bland 70s architecture that hadn’t been touched up in the forty years since.

Christine stopped at little antique shop on the corner, admiring a mannequin wearing a red cloak and a white dress.

“It looks like a Handmaiden who has a Tale,” Jeremy quipped, voice devoid of emotion.

“It’s a traditional English riding cloak, Jeremy!” Christine exclaimed, as if it was supposed to be obvious that that was the case.

Maybe it was just that he was too stupid to have known that apparently very obvious fact.

“Of course... I was kidding,” Jeremy said.

Christine pulled him inside, and the old lady at the counter told them that it would close in twenty minutes.

For the next twenty minutes, they explored the seemingly endless shelves and shelves upon shelves of antiques, so much volume in such a seemingly large building. It felt like they were in Mary Poppin’s bag.

Maybe they even had it here.

But what they did find was a green 1950s style dress, speckled with tiny white daisies. It had a sweetheart neckline and short sleeves on top, large blue buttons going down the front, and a flared skirt.

It was just Christine’s size and Jeremy couldn’t help himself from buying it for her.

She deserved it after the awful date he’d given her... her happiness was probably fake.

She thanked him a million times over and began rambling about the possibility of Grease being the spring musical. Jeremy loved listening to her ramble, would listen to her ramble for hours on end without complaint, but he just felt... like he didn’t want to be here.

And he _hated_ that. He loved her _so_ much, and yet he felt so _horrible._

Like he just didn’t belong... like she could do so much better. That someone better than him for her was out there.

________________

Jeremy stayed up late after the date, on a googling spree, absently Googling whatever showed up on his suggested when he typed ‘how to’ or ‘why.’

Eventually he started clicking his previous searches, leading to over 20 searches for ‘how to make soup’ (buy some) and ‘how to kill zombies’ (silver bullets and maybe chemical warfare)

When he snapped out of his daze, he was angry at himself. Furiously he thumbed an X across the screen and scribbled over it all with his pointer finger, which didn’t do anything or leave any marks, which made him more upset.

He threw his phone across the room, thankful that it landed in a pile of dirty clothes and didn’t make much noise at this hour.

Jeremy grabbed his notebook and flashlight off his desk and flipped to the first clean page.

And again he made a list.

This one was a list of people.

Christine was at the top of the list, because he loved her and he didn’t deserve her. Because he’d given her a Squip, and pressured her, and hurt her, and somehow she’d forgiven him and for some reason beyond his comprehension, she loved him.

She was followed by Michael, because he loved him too, as a best friend, because he had been there and tried to save Jeremy from himself and Jeremy had hurt him. And yet Michael stayed.

And then Jenna, because he ignored her until now and she had forgiven him, was grateful for his friendship, but she deserved better.

Then his dad, because he didn’t deserve the change and didn’t deserve to feel angry that it took him this long.

Then Brooke, because he hated himself for what he’d done to her even if he’d apologised a hundred times over and she, understanding the Squip, had forgiven him, even though he had inadvertently given her one.

Then was Chloe, because she had been drunk and she was just a kid, and the terror in his gut had been stupid and weak.

And then was Jake, for his legs being further broken.

And Rich, for the agony Jeremy couldn’t save him from.

And the Squip, for the agony it had inflicted on Jeremy’s weak mind and body.

He felt the glow, almost felt tingles on his neck.

_Not good enough._

He tore the page out of his notebook, unfeelingly, and pulled out his box cutter, unfeelingly.

And oh, the blood dropping onto the paper felt good to watch.


	2. second in line

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Christine’s perspective on the day before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for myself in circa 6-7 hours: i used all 3 prompts Plus 2 of the previous prompt And the cursed image And mentioned that jeremy’s Jewish af and it’s 1409 words yay

Christine tapped her pencil against her notebook impatiently as she stared at the clock.

She imagined this as the beginning of the Baby One More Time music video, with her in a skimpy schoolgirl outfit, and suddenly breaking into song and dance in the hallway when the bell rang.

Instead, Mrs. Cavis gave her a dirty look and continued with her instruction, something that Christine definitely remembered... a quick glance down at her notes reminded her that it algebra class.

Ew, math. Back to clock staring.

It was three minutes to the bell. Not knowing the bell was coming was nice, because that meant that the class was interesting enough... or at least important enough to her grade, that she was paying attention, and the bell came suddenly, right in the middle of a teacher’s sentence like every single bell in every single high school movie.

Why did high school movies focus so little on high school classes? If the teacher was in mid-sentence that was very important to the lesson, surely it was an interesting lesson.

Or maybe Mrs. Cavis was teaching the lesson in her monotone, old lady voice. All the lessons in every high school movie. She taught them in demon skin suits like in The Good Place, and got paid handsomely, but still kept her actual job as a teacher. But acting was an actual job... maybe she was really in a high school movie?

Or maybe a high school musical?

Nah, there was no Zac Efron at Middleborough High, and they sure weren’t in Albuquerque. More like Red Bank, New Jersey.

Plus, Christine would be a pretty lame character, so surely a classroom scene wouldn’t center on her. Jeremy would be a good main character, though.

And oh! There was the bell!

So it had technically been unexpected after all, because she’d daydreamed through the last three minutes of... what class was this? It felt like Mrs. Cavis taught every class she was in.

Christine looked down at her notes briefly as she shut her notebook and threw it into her backpack.

Math class. Ew.

She promenaded out of class like she was in Funny Girl (not that that was a high school musical) and headed to her second favourite place in school.

Actually, it was probably closer to number five... the noise was a big con of the place.

The cafeteria. Home of mystery meat, yelling teenagers not at all like the Mean Girls cafeteria where the Plastics were the only ones really talking, and her amazing boyfriend Jeremy.

Well... this wasn’t his home, it was the cafeteria at school where there was month old lunch meat stuck to the ceiling after the most recent food fight, but still.

Despite the din, it was a place to relax and rewind after a long four hours of school before the last three.

Why on Earth did she have such a late lunch break, anyway? If she didn’t share it with Jeremy, she would talk the guidance counsellor, Mrs. Tyron, and get her schedule switched so she could have First or Second lunch, not fucking Third lunch after the cafeteria had been trashed.

She plopped down next to Jeremy, who looked startled at her entrance but happy to see her, which was good! Christine was awfully happy to see him too... he was her boyfriend, anyway.

They had a date planned that night, a trip over to Greenvale, the next town over, to a tiny little diner that she frequented, and that Jeremy, the adorable little heathen, had never been to.

It was the coolest little place, with a jukebox and all 50s themed, and she knew the waitstaff on a first name basis. She went there just to study and drink a milkshake a lot.

She and Jeremy talked to no end about the date plans, about the diner’s kosher options for the very Jewish and very cool Jeremy.

But unfortunately, sooner than she wanted, lunch was over, and they were swept back off to class.

After school, she showed, didn’t bother washing her hair but french braided it, and put on a big, long red sweater and sky blue leggings, and also her favourite sparkly slip on shoes.

The date went off without a hitch, she thought, the meal was great as always, Marlene was nice as always, she and Jeremy shared a milkshake and talked a lot, and then window shopped, and she rambled about English riding hood cloaks.

“They were most popular in the eighteenth century, and they were so popular they are the closest England got to a traditional dress. Everyone had one.”

Jeremy nodded thoughtfully, and Christine grinned.

“C’mon, let’s go in and see what else they have!”

Jeremy, the sweetheart he was, bought her a green 1950s dress from that little antique shop. And yeah, it was only ten dollars, which was a bargain, but he was thoughtful enough that he got it for her!

Christine loved him a lot.

After that, they had a little bit of time to spare, so they stopped by the supermarket just for fun and some milk.

Milk was acquired, as was gold glitter paint for set painting, but not paper towels, because they were conspicuously out of them. Someone must have been having a paper towel party... it wasn’t like there was a hurricane or a global pandemic happening.

But finally, it was time to go back home, so she could make curfew and be spared her scatterbrain mother’s wrath. If she even remembered that Christine was out tonight like Mimi Marquez.

The road back home was dark, it being night and all, tree lined and quiet, lit only by the headlights of the car and Christine’s imagination.

“This seems like it could be the start of a murder mystery... or an episode of law and order,” Christine commented. She turned her voice low and dramatic. “Two intrepid lovers, simply speeding along the road in the dead of night, desperately trying to meet curfew, when suddenly, the Scratcher Murderer falls into the car.”

“The Scratcher Murderer?” Jeremy asked.

“Yeah... he... he scratches into people’s cars with his fingernails until he gains entry and then he shoots them while they’re still driving.”

“No offence, but there’s probably more efficient ways of vehicular murder... distract me so I crash, shoot into the car... that wouldn’t be so bad...”

“But then if he did that he’d probably die and that’s not his goal.”

“If he’s scratching into cars and shooting people while the car is in motion, the car is crashing pretty much no matter what. He might as well just shoot through the roof of the car, in my opinion.”

“Okay, fine, true, but that’s not as interesting as someone scratching through the freaking roof!” Christine pouted.

And all in all, as she kissed her wonderful boyfriend goodnight and raced into the house, she thought it was a really good, very successful date.

After changing into pajamas, she decided to browse Wikihow, because why not? If she pressed the Surprise Me button enough times maybe there would be something really useful, because she never really had a specific thing to look up on Wikihow.

So she found herself reading an article on how to write in cursive, complete with little guides and GIFS. A word, which, by the way, is pronounced like Gift without the F, not like Jiff peanut butter. Christine considered Jiff people heathens... store brand peanut butter was usually just fine.

Even though it was midnight, she didn’t want to go to bed or do homework, so she printed out just the picture for the guide to writing the letter Z, and after five minutes, she could confidently say she could write a cursive Z.

She also looked up ‘cursive Z’ on the internet and came up with a very cursed image of a... poorly drawn pencil man drawing the Z, that she sent to Jeremy.

He didn’t respond.

But hey, she could write a cursive Z now!

A... an utterly, completely useless skill.

Made more useless, in her opinion, after the phone call she’d gotten right as she was getting ready for school.

It was Michael, which was weird, because usually Michael and her just texted each other memes back and forth, usually they only called each other when either of them had misplaced their phone or one of them stumbled upon a livestream.

“Hello?” She answered.

“It’s Jeremy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> woo he ded son


	3. third in line

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael’s perspective as the hours move forward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2AM.
> 
> i need to stop.
> 
> 1k, 3 prompts, 1 previous prompt, theeeee end.

Michael, from his uncomfortable plastic chair, chose to allow his mind to wander and focus on a happier memory than what was happening right now.

He remembered a month ago, when he and Jeremy had gone camping together. Just them, a cooler, a tent, and some camping chairs, and Michael’s car.

It had been incredibly fun. They’d gone hiking around the park’s lake, walked across the bridge, through the woods. 

The woods were... well... wooden. Jeremy made plenty of jokes about how wooden everything was, but it was beautiful, it was quiet, and it was peaceful.

Away from society, Michael hated to give baby boomers any credit, but unplugging for a couple days was really nice. 

He did bring his camera, and took a very picturesque picture of Jeremy standing on the bridge looking out at the lake and shoreline, and then promptly forgot to use it for the rest of the trip.

They’d spent two hours trying to pitch the tent, failing miserably and laughing so hard at themselves that they continued to fail miserably.

Their fire starting was almost as bad, it was pitch black before they got anything going, and then they just threw a bunch of leaves on, made it big for two minutes to roast the veggie hot dogs Jeremy had snuck into the cooler (he had also taken out the regular hot dogs and declared the camping trip a quote unquote ‘kosher kamping krip with a k’.)

And goddamnit, Jeremy had laughed harder than he had in years, smiled more than he had in years, allowed himself to be comfortable and just have fun as himself in probably a longer time than anything else.

He had been _happy._

Michael had missed happy Jeremy. After the Squip, he’d realised how sad Jeremy had been, how sad he’d been for _years,_ that Michael had never really noticed or paid attention to.

So to make up for it he put extra effort into making Jeremy comfortable and happy, trying to get back his old smile.

And that camping trip, it finally paid off, and he was happy for the first time in god only knows how long. Happy for real, cracking jokes, smiling and laughing and being a goofball.

That was the Jeremy he loved.

Not romantically, of course- he felt he shouldn’t have to clarify that, especially in his innermost thoughts as Jeremy laid dying.

But he was aro, Jeremy was attached and totally not into him, and the thought of Jeremy naked made him very sad.

He loved him as a best friend and he always would.

And if he died now it would fucking break him.

Christine had barely even gotten to experience happy goofball Jeremy. He’d shown through a couple times, but hadn’t really come out except on one date that he was told about, and on that camping trip.

Where on day two they were so cold and hungry that the fact that there were trees that were wooden was fucking hilarious, where Jeremy made so many jokes about a primitive spanking tool called the Nintendo Switch that Michael snorted his Gatorade.

And now he was in the hospital, Jeremy was dying.

He had tried to kill himself, and there was no sign of it before this.

No red flags, no acting sad.... if he had been sad this whole time he was putting up a helluva front for everyone.

Or....

Or maybe it was him not knowing how to see Jeremy’s emotions yet again.

Maybe it was him, and if he’d noticed Jeremy wouldn’t be here.

But he was, whether it was his fault or not, he was in a room on oxygen and Michael wasn’t allowed to see him, and Christine was next to him bawling her eyes out, and Mr. Heere was probably with Jeremy but who knew, the hours staring at the linoleum floor in the plastic chair stretched and faded and blurred together like playing with Silly Putty.

It felt like Michael was trying to keep a single grain of sand inside a sifter that was being shaken at fifty miles an hour.

No matter the cause, the trigger, the past, whatever... Jeremy was in a hospital bed on oxygen, getting a blood transfusion because he’d slit his wrists and tried to kill himself.

What was probably his suicide note was just a list of names. 

Christine, him, his dad, and basically everyone Jeremy interacted with with the Squip were on that list.

And Michael could barely breathe, much less think about the meaning of the list.

He was lost in his thoughts and loosing it in his thoughts, holding so tightly to the arms of the chair that his fingers were turning white and he could barely _breathe._

It was two in the morning, Christine was sobbing next to him, and Michael was sitting stoic and static but clutching the chair and barely breathing.

He let go of the chair and grabbed his phone with shaking hands, putting on his headphones, pulling up his hood, and putting on a podcast, the first one that showed up on his app.

It wasn’t Christine’s fault, but if he listened to her sobbing just a little bit longer he would loose it. 

She and Jeremy had just been on a date that night (or the previous evening, technically). They’d gone on a date to a diner, gotten dinner, shopped, and Christine had reported that it had been an amazing, fun date.

That nothing seemed off.

The podcast Michael turned on was one of his plentiful nerdy podcasts, and unfortunately the one he put on was this one with the world’s most annoying host with the most annoying voice, which irritated him more than it needed to, so he pulled up his music app and put on a Japanese heavy metal girl group.

It didn’t really help... but it was better than Brandon Dandon with the most annoying voice and nitpicking podcast.

A glance next to him saw that Christine was still crying her eyes out, and he turned up the volume.

Jeremy was dying in the hospital and Michael couldn’t fucking bring himself to comfort his girlfriend.

He turned his mind back to the trees, and the picture on the bridge, and the fire that took so long and was the best thing in the world in that moment.

All he could think about was Jeremy’s smile and how it was absent after that camping trip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my tumblr is @nbchristinecanigula! the bmq tumblr is @bmc-gift-exchange!
> 
> shadesabyss get off my fic.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr is @nbchristinecanigula & the bmq tumblr is @bmc-gift-exchange


End file.
